They Shall Not Grow Old

They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) is Peter Jackson's documentary you can watch online on iFILM. The director of The Lord of the Rings took a century-old archive of British war footage and gave it back its breath.

Trench film shot at the front between 1914 and 1918 was hand-coloured by Jackson's team, its jerky speed corrected and a full soundscape built from scratch. Lip-readers worked out what the men were saying, so a silent past found its voice. There is no narrator and no lecture: the story comes from the veterans themselves, recorded by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC decades after they came home. Boys joke, shiver, brew tea beside the guns and go over the top knowing many of them will not return.

The result is not a history lesson but a face-to-face meeting with men you usually see only as flickering shapes in black-and-white nothing. Released for the centenary of the Armistice, it shows the war from a private's eye-line, far from the staff maps. Stream They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) online on iFILM.